Mozilla Firebird - A review

1. Firebird

I have been using Mozilla Firebird for some time now and have stopped
my search of a better browser. I had used Mozilla earlier, but it was
so bloated that I switched to Galeon. However, if I had a beefier
system, I would have been happy with Mozilla, bloat or no
bloat. Mozilla took a lot of time to startup and came bundled with a
chat client and a mail reader, which I seldom used. On the other hand
its `tabbed windows' reduced a lot of desktop clutter. The
Firebird is a spin-off from Mozilla. The project aims to
develop software that is smaller and faster than Mozilla by extracting
and redesigning the browser part of the application suite.

The goal was, and is not to have more or less features than any other
client (Mozilla included) but to have the right set of features
to let people get their jobs done.

From what I see, I must congratulate the developers on a job very well
done.

2. Installation

Using RPMs

I used the RPM to install Firebird on Red Hat 9.0. I am sure the hints
provided here will prove useful for installing on another RPM based
system. I used the RPMS for Red Hat maintained and built by
Dag Wieers. If
you want to locate the RPMs for your own distribution, try searching
at rpmseek. Use `mozilla-firebird' as
your search string.

After downloading the RPM, you can install it from the command prompt rpm -ivh <package-name>

If you had installed Mozilla or Galeon earlier, you should have no
dependency problems. Otherwise, you may have to search, download and
install other packages too to solve the dependency problems. Again the
best places to find the packages are
rpmseek,
Rpmfind.Net and
Rpm pbone.

If you installed Firebird using the RPM package provided by Dag
Wieers, then you can launch Firebird by giving the command
mozilla-firebird. If you installed using the package provded by
some other repository, type rpm -ql <package-name>|grep -i
/usr/bin. That will provide you the command to launch Firebird.

Using official Firebird Release

Disclaimer I installed from a RPM and not from the official
Firebird Release.

I will give a brief outline of the installation process. After you
have downloaded the appropiate tarball from the above mentioned links,
login as root. Unzip the files into the directory
`/usr/lib/'. Next, issue the command chown -c -r
root:root /usr/lib/mozilla-firebird In case you unzipped the
tarball into a different directory, remember to substitute the proper
name of the directory. That's all to the install process. To launch
your brand new browser, issue the command /usr/lib/mozilla-firebird/MozillaFirebird However, if you
want to make it your default browser in GNOME and want to avoid the
hassle of typing the full path every time, see the next section.

Installation in Windows

If you have a 100% Linux shop, you can safely skip this
step. However, if you have to use Windows, I would strongly suggest
that you consider switching from Internet Explorer to
Firebird. I
tested it out on a Windows 2000 PC. As in Linux, you have to just
unzip the files, click on the `MozillaFirebird.exe' and that is
the end of the installation process. The first time it starts up,
Firebird imports your IE bookmarks and also asks you if you would like
to make Firebird your default browser.

3. Making it the default browser in GNOME

Login as root and in your `/usr/bin/' directory create a file
called `firebird-remote'. Put the following lines into it

Just change the directory locations to suit your installation. Use
chmod a+x /usr/bin/firebird-remote to assign everyone the
permission to execute the script. That is all the work required by you
as root.

In case you are wondering what this shell-script does, here is a brief
explanation. When Firebird is invoked with the `-remote'
argument, it does not open a window, but instead connects to and
controls an already-existing process. The argument `openURL
(URL, new-tab)' creates a new tab displaying the specified
document. If you would rather have it open a new window, use
`openURL (URL, new-window)' instead. The page
remote control of unix
mozilla has more explanation about this. Thie above script first
checks if we already have a Firebird running and displays the page in
a new tab. If it does not find one, it creates a new process and
displays the page in it.

Next, if you wnat to make Firebird your default browser in GNOME, you
have to edit the file `~/.gnome/Gnome'. You will find it contains a directive

Thats all to it. Your default browser for GNOME and its associate apps
like Evolution is now Firebird.

4. What's Good

Firebird packs quite a lot of power under its hood. The feature I like
the most is tabbed-browsing. When you Ctrl + click on a
link, it opens on a page in background Tab. This way, you go on
reading the current page and the new page gets loaded in the
background.

Firebird stops annoying popup windows dead in their tracks. This is a
good example of a good thing implemented in a very non-intrusive
manner. When it blocks a popup window, it displays an icon in the
status bar. Clicking this icon shows a breakdown of the popup that
Firebird stopped when loading the current page. You can then allow
some or all of the popup windows to be shown.

Quite a few people think
Free Software means
an ugly user interface. Firebird is aesthetically designed, with nice
icons and colors. If you are not happy with the default look-and-feel,
checkout the themes
collection on display. Some themes simply change the colors of
Mozilla Firebird, others can change every piece of the browser
appearance. I have switched from the default theme to the
LittleFirebird theme, which reduces screen-space usage.

Firebird allows enhancing of the basic browser by use of
extensions. If there a particular feature which you think Firebird
lacks, check out the
extensions
available. In all probability, you will find what you need there.

5. More tips

Plugins

Whenever Firebird comes across a page which needs some particular
plugin to be installed, it asks you whether you want to install the
plugin or not. It then takes you to the download page of that
particular plugin. However, you can get all the major plugins from
Mozilla Plugin Support
page for Linux (or the
Windows page).

Block opening new windows

Firebird doesn't stop web pages from opening in new windows (i.e using
the target="_blank" or the illegal target="_new"
properties.) you can tweak your settings to do this. In the address
bar, if you type about:config, it takes you to the browser's
settings page. Use the `Filter' to find the string
browser.block.target_new_window, right click on it and
Modify the value to true.

Increase text size

If you find the text size of a site too small, you can increase it by
using the Ctrl + + key.